[numair]

> Maybe the answer is money that doesn't settle instantly.. Kind of like how your paypal payments are "on hold" whenever you get them to give the sender time to realise they've been scammed. Maybe all payments take 2 weeks to settle, and everyone lives on free credit up to the unsettled amount..

Well, all credit card payments are basically exactly this (which you’d know, given your previous job). The crypto crowd always yell “no chargebacks!” when trying to attract people to their platforms, but chargebacks are actually a feature, not a bug — for the very reason you just described.

I don’t like it, though. It seems totally inefficient, and there are better ways to do this.

Edit: I want to add, because of chargebacks, any credit card processor that doesn’t hold your money for, like, 6 months or whatever, is accepting the credit risk associated with what would happen if all of your transactions were charged back and you weren’t good for the money. Hence why their risk management is a nightmare, and why anyone who enters that space ends up looking like a bad guy who arbitrarily freezes people’s money (unless they choose to use humans rather than AI, but that doesn’t “scale,” right?).

[SkipperCat]

My father was scammed out of $1200 USD. He had a pop-up on his browser that said his computer was broken. It's the most cheesy scam on the web but this 80 year old man didn't know better. He thought he was getting a great deal - $1200 for lifetime support of his computer.

Anyway, he told us the same day and we immediately called his bank. It was under 24 hours and they shut down the payment. He didn't lose a penny.

So, yeah, I totally agree with you. The slowness of payments and chargebacks are a feature, not a bug. Same way that we have checkpoints before we deploy code to prod. Not having this assumes that everyone is making decisions in their best interest all the time. In reality, we do bone-headed things quite often and need a fair redo.